The Perp of Pop

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, a puckish German wit once quipped. But were Karl Marx alive today, he would doubtless find both tragedy and comedy in the pedophile scandals of that most egregious piece of late-20th-century detritus, Michael Jackson. War in Iraq, turmoil in Turkey, continued unrest in Israel, mass demonstrations against George W. Bush in London  and in the U.S. every news camera was focused on a celebrity freak. Was it only 10 years ago that the singer-songwriter-skin-lightener-enthusiast was being investigated by the Santa Barbara District Attorneys Office for molesting a preteen boy? Now here we are once more with the same D.A. charging an older but obviously none-the-wiser Michael Jackson for allegedly molesting another preteen boy. And now here I am as well, contemplating the self-proclaimed King of Pop, his mass-media crown ever askew. So, is it déjà vu all over again? Not quite.

Michael Jackson 93 wasnt handcuffed and perp-walked like Michael Jackson 03. And the deference shown by the mainstream media to a musical superstar has given way to bemused indifference with a performer given to releasing great hits collections as new product while selling off his allegedly private life as a series of contrived documentary specials. In fact, the only new song on Number Ones  the album released on the day of Jacksons new scandal tsunami  is One More Chance, a ditty co-written with R. Kelly, another star under investigation for child molestation, albeit with girls. But outside of that, as Edie Beale was wont to say, Sometimes its very difficult to separate the past from the present.

In 1993, I was writing for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, where we thought we had a full-scale think-style profile on our hands  what with Jacksons show-business past and sex-criminal present to put into perspective. So, to that end I canvassed everyone from screenwriters, producers, plastic surgeons and PR personnel, to testy African-American minister Reverend William Epps (This is a wake-up call to Michael Jackson, to let him know who he is), Jackson hagio-biographer J. Randy Taraborelli (Id just as soon not have Michael reveal that his girlfriend is Brooke Shields because obviously shes not. That says more about him than if he would have said, I dont have a girlfriend), famed L.A. muralist Kent Twitchell (who Jackson  via a front organization  was planning to pay to paint the performers likeness on the side of the El Capitan theater in Hollywood), andbest of all, intrepid telejournalist Diane Dimond (then with Hard Copy, now with Court TV).

Tom Sneddon, the D.A. in Santa Barbara, is a no-holds-barred graduate of Notre Dame. Hes not a politician, Dimond told me back in 93. Hes a trial lawyer. And he doesnt do anything for show. I think the case is going to stay open for the remainder of the six-year statute of limitations. All my police sources and investigative sources are telling me, We might not be able to get him because the kid wont testify  no victim, no crime. But were going to leave the case open and watch him like a hawk.

And indeed they did  well past the statute of limitations, moving in for a hawklike kill thanks to the fact that this time out, the victim hasnt launched a civil suit like his predecessor, the now 23-year-old Jordie Chandler. Moreover, since that time, the law has changed, making it possible for the authorities to proceed with this new case as they hadnt with the old one. No civil settlement can now get in the D.A.s way. It was because of this settlement that my original article was eventually scotched  there being no further story to write. But as the great Mae West said, Keep a diary, and one day itll keep you. Likewise a reporters notes  which could well have been written yesterday rather than a decade ago.

Michael likes photo books that document suffering, says Todd Gray, a young African-American who worked as Jacksons personal photographer (I was his instant pocket camera) from 1979 to 1983. Remember those photos Louis Hine took of kids in sweatshops at the turn of the [20th] century? Michael liked the look of those photos and preferred to be shot like them  looking melancholy and a little distant. And so, in a culture where appearance is all, Jacksons aura of fragility  likened by Steven Spielberg to a fawn in a burning forest  was not only manufactured as a visual trademark but eagerly disseminated by an unfailingly credulous press as a key personality trait.

Gray, who was thrown out of the Jackson inner circle when he submitted photos of Jackson to Newsweek without the singers express approval, observed power plays firsthand. He freezes people out. Hell play people off against each other at board meetings  knowing they all want to impress him. And he has a history of changing all the people around him every two albums or so  the accountant, the lawyer, everybody.

The standard Afrocentric point of view interprets Michael Jackson as an example of racial self-hatred. Okay, thats one view. But theres another that links up with Michel Foucaults notion that the power structure no longer has to police society because there are already police programmed by that society in the brain, which maintains a certain check on behavior. Who am I to criticize Michael Jacksons surgeries as self-hating? Thats an essentialist point of view on race. I must respect him and allow him to make any decision he wants to make as to how hes going to reconfigure his self or gender or what have you.

Those Hine photos will doubtless prove helpful to Jackson when he comes up for trial. Melancholy and a little distant is a perfect look for him on the stand. Foucault, however, is less helpful in such a setting  unless he wants to change his plea. As for power plays, theyll be less in evidence. For while hes on the lookout for detectives, presumably to supply the kind of muscle that the currently incarcerated Anthony Pellicano provided for him in the Jordie era, former friends are heading to the lifeboats, with the S.S. Michael Jackson taking on water faster than the Titanic. Producer Quincy Jones claimed his dealings with Jackson were all about the music. I wasnt involved in his personal life. Liza Minnelli, whose soon-to-be-ex husband David Gest had Jackson serve as his best man at the couples lavish photo-op of a wedding last year, declined comment. And were not likely to hear much from such discarded Jackson playmates as Macaulay Culkin, Alfonso Ribeiro, Emmanuel Lewis and Corey Feldman. Like Jordie, theyre over the hill. And likely quite happy to be so.

When a performers act for so long features random violence and strangled sexuality, how can that performer pose as a friend of achild? asks humorist Harry Shearer, whose radio program Le Show has taken frequent swipes at Jacksons pretensions. Look at the Smooth Criminal video, where hes shown rescuing children from an evil drug lord against the background of a song about a woman being raped in her own apartment.

The one thing that show-business people can do that public officials cant quite do as well, Shearer observes, is dress themselves in the robes of humanitarianism. The difference is, Washington journalists, when theyre being lied to persistently enough, eventually smell a rat. In this town the more persistently and elaborately you lie to journalists, the more they buy it and the less curious they get.

Needless to say, such sentiments would have to be amended in George W. Bushs America  where being lied to is so common that rat en croûte has become the journalists spécialité de la maison, and a former bodybuilder famous for playing a robot in science-fiction films can be made governor of California.

My first reaction to the whole thing with Michael was anger, says comedian Paul Mooney, a onetime collaborator of comedian Richard Pryors and a veteran of the comedy circuit for decades, who has made frequent sport of the singer in his routine. It seems they build up these black entertainers, and then they try to tear them down. But the thing is . . . I dont know any black people like Michael Jackson.

In February of 1993, when a Los Angeles Times reporter queried Mooney about his reaction to Jacksons appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Special, the comics reaction was brusque: It wont have any bearing on his career. Its over; everybody knows it. Hes like The Phantom of the Opera. It all seemed so insincere. But in the wake of the child-molestation allegations, the police search of Jacksons property and the revelation that the authorities had pictures taken of the singers private parts (the better to corroborate the testimony of his 13-year-old accuser), Mooneys attitude has altered  somewhat.

I just dont understand why he let that happen. For a black man theres always the threat hanging over your head of going to jail. That dont scare me. Ive known that since I was a kid. But they searched through his house like it was some niggers apartment in Harlem! Look, you find a 13-year-old naked and tied up in my living room, and I still wouldnt let you take pictures of my dick and my ass!

Hes real concerned about what you think of him, Mooney notes evenly. He called me up one time about my talking about his wanting to make himself look white on Arsenio. I told him that I dont tell him what songs to sing, so please dont tell me what jokes to tell. He asked me if there was anything he could do for me.

Mooney pauses, rolling the recollection over in his mind. I told him the next time I did Arsenio, I would talk about him. But the next time, I didnt, and he sent me some Cristal champagne. Mooney pauses again, having suddenly decided that the incident was less inconsequential than he first thought. You know, he says hotly, the first thing I asked him was how he got my number and my address  that really pissed me off!

The comedian is plainly deep in thought now. Hes just backed himself into a corner, I guess, he says of Jackson softly. And then theres this fixing his nose and his face and all that. I think wide noses are beautiful. I think theyre sexy. I think theyre us.

And any number of African-Americans would agree. However, a white philosopher takes a tack similar to that of black photographer Todd Gray:

Michael Jackson, Jean Baudrillard writes in The Transparency of Evil, is a solitary mutant, a precursor of a hybridization that is perfect because it is universal  the race to end all races . . . Michael Jackson has had his face lifted, his hair straightened, his skin lightened  in short, he has been reconstructed with the greatest attention to detail. This is what makes him such an innocent and pure child  the artificial hermaphrodite of the fable, better even than Christ to reign over the world and reconcile its contradictions; better that a child-god because he is a child-prosthesis, and embryo of all those dreamt-of mutations that will deliver us from race and from sex.

But what Michael Jacksons life has actually shown is that theres no deliverance from either. And while the spectacle he provides may be welcomed by the administration as a Weapon of Mass Distraction from its multifarious misdeeds, it shouldnt be overlooked that, unlike Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush, Michael Jackson is now under arrest.